Cat - tastrophe

Well, I'm scrambling here. My agent is coming to my city this weekend to appear at a local mystery writing conference, and I really wanted to have my revisions done by then. But Real Life often hits with a crash and a yowl, and it looks like I won't get it finished quite on time.

I homeschool my two muchkins. Well, it's almost homeschool. They're in a nationally accredited correspondance school, and they send in their schoolwork. We'd made plans to finish this year up by the end of June, and then we got behind. So I've been scrambling to help them get back on track and get packets mailed in just as fast as we can crank them out. That's gumming up the writing, but both are important, so I try to divide my time between them. Oh, and sleep. And eat. Usually sleeping and eating get shoved to the back burner, but sooner or later you pass out from lack of one or the other.

And then there's the cat. Last night I had just dragged my sleep-deprived self out of the chair I'd collapsed in, eaten a plate of fruit and protein and started to work on the revisions again, when the cat got up from my desk to lick the plate and then just went completely berserk. Crying, meowing, telling me that something was wrong, wrong, wrong. I put him down on the floor because he made the meow that usually means he's going to be sick, but this time it was pain, not hairball. When he walked, his left hind paw scissored in front of the right hind paw, so he listed like a drunken something-or-other. I thought he was having a stroke, but he never lost the use of the limbs--just acted like he was in pain whenever he moved that one back leg. The ensuing distress woke up the whole household. We all hovered anxiously as we determined that he'd suffered an injury, not a stroke. One of the kids had stumbled over him when she got up to go to the bathroom, and it must have hurt him somehow, though nothing's broken. Sheesh. Things that go bump in the night.... Today he's much better, able to climb up to the back of the couch to sleep in the sun, stand up to eat with apparent relish, and not meowing in pain. Everyone else is sleep-deprived and hollow-eyed. Which just proves--the household really does revolve around His Cattishness.